You are here

Content & Marketing Strategy

BrandUP 2018 Participant, Frailty Myths

Nominations and applications are now open for the 2019 brandUP, a free 2-day intensive marketing and communication workshop co-presented with Full Circle Fund. One of last year's nonprofit participants Frailty Myths has now had some time to reflect on the experience, so we sat down to chat with their Co-founder and Director, Erinn Carter, to provide helpful tips to this year's participants.

1. What is Frailty Myths currently focused on as an organization?

As an organization entering our third year of operation, we’re working to solidify our foundation as an organization, working to share our vision as to how to change the world with an even larger audience, and discovering new donors to expand our impact to more communities. From an institutional perspective, this means streamlining and defining how we speak about our theory of change, our strategy for creating that change, and discovering new ways to partner and collaborate with other organizations to amplify our mission.

We’ve partnered with a number of organization, community groups, and leaders to create dynamic spaces for inspiring our participants to challenge inequality, patriarchy and what exactly a leader “looks like.” From our three part series with community garden Pollinate Farms in the heart of the Fruitvale community in Oakland, CA to our “Lift As We Climb” aerial ballet workshop with internationally renowned Bandaloop performers, Frailty Myths has looked to expand our voice while maintaining a strong connection to our core mission, which is inspiring a new generation of women, trans, and gender nonconforming folks to embrace leadership and smash the myth of frailty.

2. Through a communications lens, what have you been focused on over the last year and how is that supporting your overall organizational goals?

We’ve worked hard to share the story of Frailty Myths, both our founding and our theory of change that we accomplish through our work. We’ve worked on this from a number of fronts:

1. Establishing a voice online in our social media accounts and how we interact with our audience. This includes creating original content, engaging questions from our audience, and engaging with organizations and groups that share our overall mission of empowering marginalized communities around the world.

2. Participating in media opportunities, including podcasts and local media to share our message in new audiences. We worked to create a press release regarding our work and developed a database of outlets that overlap with our mission and began to reach out to them.

3. Streamlining our visitors experience on our website. This meant doing a lot of editing to summarize our mission and also working to envision what the journey that each website visitor may go on, depending on their entry point to our website.

4. We’re celebrating March and “Women’s History Month” by going on a nationwide tour, bringing Frailty Myths workshops to the community in five cities across the United States. We’ve worked over the past few month and leading up to the tour amplifying our mission to new audiences across the country and connecting with allied organizations in different cities.

As a new and growing organization, getting an opportunity to get new eyes on our work and our vision was invaluable. We spent so much time as an organization essentially speaking to ourselves; getting an opportunity to get educated and passionate eyes on our product and getting feedback as to how we could make it clearer and more effective was amazing. We changed a number of things after the workshop. We think a lot more now from the perspective of what our participants or outsiders journey may be in experiencing us for the first time. Can we make understanding what we do at Frailty Myths clear, concise, and to the point? What is our theory of change and how can we share that vision with our audience? After the workshop, we made those questions central to our communications mission.

4. Did anything change in your communications and processes from before to after your brandUP experience? How have you integrated the work into your marketing materials and planning?

We’ve mentioned some of the specific ways in which we’ve incorporated this work into our marketing materials online with our social media profiles. We’ve also streamlined and focused our filmed marketing materials, including a new commercial advertising our mission and impact.

5. Was there anything that was unexpected or surprised you that came out of the work we did together?

I think the continued communication that I’ve had with so many of the people from Rootid and Full Circle Fund after the workshop. The fact that I’ve been able to email and ask questions impressed me so much. There’s a real sense that the folks that have created this program believed in the projects that were selected to be a part of BrandUP, even beyond the few days that we spent together at the workshop.

6. In what ways do you think we can use this process to help organizations like yours further their missions?

As a new organization, we’re primarily focused on what we need to improve, how we can streamline established processes and make our own that fit with our goal and how we operate as an organization. As such, we’re pretty focused on what we’re doing wrong. Having this process, which not only helped to highlight what we could do better, but also showed us spaces where we were succeeding, was really inspiring for me.

I’d also say that the process of being able to pull back from the day to day grind of operating a new nonprofit to be able to refocus on what we’re doing and why we’re doing was so valuable. Prioritizing the bigger picture of “Why” and what are the larger steps to successfully manifesting our “Why” was really helpful in reminding us of what our process is and why were have dedicated our lives to creating a new space for change to blossom.

When I think about BrandUP in terms of the return on the invested time, it’s an impressive experience. Almost more than a year later, we’ve implemented ideas from the workshop into our day to day practice, we’re continuing our relationship with many of the organizations and leaders we met in the workshop, and we’re thinking about ways to use this work in the future. If people are willing to invest the time and effort, the BrandUP experience is definitely worth it.

7. What advice would you give to this next co-hort so that they can be prepared for and get the most out of their experience?

The “homework” for the workshop is really important. I know that many organizations like mine are just a few people doing a incredible number of jobs at the same time. But taking the time before the workshop to think about different donors and their specific donor journey, solidifying your theory of change, and connecting with each staff member that will participate at the workshop beforehand feels paramount to getting the most out of the workshop. With so little time to think about really dynamic questions, you’ll want to spend as much time being able to think about new ideas and new strategies, not questions about the direction of your work or your foundation vision.

Heifer International offered a goat mask printout and encouraged donors to take selfies or goat-o-bomb (photobomb) others. The photos were then posted on Giving Tuesday, using #GoatSquadGoals, accompanied by a quick line underlining their philanthropic efforts. Not only did this effort entertain and validate Heifer’s mission, it also highlighted the key role goats play in ending poverty around the world.

TomTod celebrated Giving Tuesday with a twist, using the day to thank their supporters. The nonprofit spent the day delivering balloons, food trays, and swag bags to local donors—strengthening their relationships and earning media attention for their programs.

Baker Industries launched a social media campaign (#500Lunches) to provide non-perishable lunches for those in their work rehabilitation program—people with disabilities, recovering substance abusers, individuals on parole, and the homeless.

Employees at the Wendy’s Restaurant Support Center wrote holiday card messages that were donated to the Ohio State University Star House, a local drop-in shelter for homeless youth. Each holiday card contained a Wendy’s gift card.

Camp K, a charity camp for children and adults with disabilities, celebrated their 50th anniversary with a boxing gala on Giving Tuesday. Using the hashtag #KO4CAMPK (Knockout for Camp K), they received sponsorship from local businesses, sold tickets to their supporters, and asked for donations from those who could not attend.

The Pratt Library of Baltimore knows nothing gets attention like a little friendly competition. Following an NFL game between the Baltimore Ravens and Cincinnati Bengals, Pratt challenged the Cincinnati Public Library to see which library could raise more on Giving Tuesday (#BookBowl). The executive director of the “losing” library agreed to dress up and perform a reading from a book written by a local author from the winning city.

Our Takeaway

With a little creative marketing, these groups rocked Giving Tuesday and promoted some great causes! If you need help with your next campaign, be sure to drop us a line.

6 Questions to Ask Before Hiring a Web Development Company

Hiring a web development firm to design and build a website can be daunting—time consuming and resource intensive.

Finding a development company to work with can feel a like finding a mechanic you can trust to work on your car. Here are six questions that will give you confidence to start the process today.

1. Where is the site going to be hosted?

Your site has to live somewhere, some organizations handle hosting themselves, but most don’t. I would argue that virtually none should. Hosting a website sounds trivial at first, but it can have a lot of hidden complexities.

You don’t need to have a host lined up before hiring a firm, but you should ask teams you’re interviewing for a web development project which host they recommend. Experienced teams will have one or more that they enjoy working with, and will steer you away from places they’ve had problems with in the past.

Some questions to consider when choosing a host are:

How are backups handled?Start with the assumption that worst case scenarios will happen frequently. If your whole site were to be erased, how much data loss is acceptable, and what is the minimum you need for a satisfactory recovery?

Do you want to be able to review changes privately before making them live on your site?Some hosts have a built in workflow that includes testing and development sites that are automatically configured. This makes it easy to review a site in a place that isn’t as public as your main domain name. Any development shop worth anything will set this up on their end to show you the site before making it live, but having this built into your hosting means you can try out changes yourself before making them live and/or your development site can survive past a shop moving on to other jobs.

How much traffic do you expect your site to get and can the web host handle it?Some organizations will get a handful of hits per month and virtually any web host will be adequate for their site, others will get a constant stream of hits and will need a robust web server that is configured to handle that volume of traffic. Generally speaking, if you’re getting more than a couple hundred hits a month, a shared server (GoDaddy, BlueHost, HostGator…) is off the table and should not be considered.

Hosting CostOften we see clients looking for the cheapest hosting option, but we tend to warn them away from the cheapest. Cheap often comes with downsides: security vulnerabilities, performance issues and the additional costs associated with lack of developer tools. Usually paying a little extra for a better server and better tool sets will actually save you in the long-run. Think strategically. Cheap has its costs.

2. How are website software updates handled?

A content management system (CMS) is a software package. Just like your phone, or computer, it needs to be updated. These updates can have implications for ongoing costs to the site.

Security vulnerabilities will be found and your site can be hacked into if they aren’t fixed. If you’re thinking “That doesn’t matter to me, there’s nothing mission-critical on my website” then you’re wrong. Your website forms a part of your official identity, a hacker could alter the content of your site, or cause your site to redirect to material that could hurt your reputation.

If you have a technical person on staff you may be able to handle these updates internally, if not, then you need to have a plan for site updates. Some firms will offer maintenance contracts to handle site updates, some will tell you that you’re on your own. Either way, before you commit to working with a shop, make sure you know how you’re going to handle your site updates.

3. Who is responsible for writing your website’s content - internal or contractor?

Web projects can take a lot of time. Depending on the size that means weeks to months, maybe much longer.

While your developers are working on the designs and code for your site you should be working on the content. We advise clients to start writing content as soon as the sitemap is in place.

Other time sinks in the content process are:

Finding good photography. Sometimes you need to generate more.

Passing content to management and higher-ups to approve writing.

Bottom line: Do not leave this until the last minute.

4. Who is your point of contact with the web development shop? Who is their point of contact in your organization?

Things will work easier if both parties have one person to serve as a point of contact for the other. If possible, these two people should be passing most of the communications to each other. This is not to say that this is the only direct contact happening, and it shouldn’t be. There will be times that an in-house designer will need to pass on design notes to the designer working on the project, or people in your organization testing the site will need to pass on bug reports to the developer.

But what you want to avoid is having people on your end communicating directly with the developer asking for changes to features, or even entirely new features. That can lead to absolute chaos, as people in your organization may not know what the scope of your contract with the developer is, and now could be asking them to change or build something costly.

I personally have gotten requests from people working for our clients that would have added thousands of dollars to the budget of a project. Anytime I get requests for alterations or additions from someone who isn’t the point person, I make sure to ask the point person about it and make sure it’s ok, but not everyone is going to be so careful.

5. What tools does this shop use to facilitate communications?

Big projects, no matter what kind, can be messy. They take a lot of time, involve a lot of people, and iterations of design, development, and testing.

Keeping your communications organized will be critical. Working with a firm that has addressed this problem and can tell you what tools they use is very important. If you ask about tools they use to facilitate communications and you hear, "Email" in the response, that’s a red flag.

At the very least you should have access to a task management system, hopefully one that can double as an issue tracker. Ideally, some kind of project-centric instant messaging service should be in there as well, but that isn’t as essential.

Generally, you want to avoid situations where communications can be lost, or multiple threads of conversations can happen about the same topic.

If I email the designer about a header image, and the designer emails you about it, that’s now two threads of communication about a single topic. The designer isn’t a super-human, that person needs to remember which decisions have been made about that header image. They may remember something got said in 'some email,' but can’t remember to who or when.

With a task management system you have a Header Image task, and everyone just comments there about the header image. Everyone sees everything being said about it, so you all remain on the same page.

6. What are you trying to accomplish with your website?

You need a website, but why?

What do you want out of it? A good web development shop will ask you this question, a great one will help you answer it by interviewing stakeholders, customers/constituents, and board members. But in all reality, you should have a handle on this before you even sit down with a third party.

A good place to start is by finishing this sentence: “When someone visits our website I want them to _____”.

We often suggest to clients to think about the top 3 things you want site visitors to see and do and focus on those. A lot of organizations can end up with unfocused sites—huge things that try to be and do everything. Or they end up with iceberg sites, where there’s a vast amount of content hidden beneath a deceptively sparse homepage. Think about it this way: Do you want people to be signing up for your email list? Then highlight the signup form so you see it immediately when the page loads.

Do you have a large media library you’re trying to have accessed? Don’t hide the only link to it in a dropdown menu, highlight it multiple times on the homepage with some kind of featured item area, and maybe a slider that highlights categories. Looking for donations? Make it impossible to miss the donate button and highlight what donations are being used for with your site.

A good firm will help you think strategically about your web development goals and flesh out a strong plan of action. Ultimately, you should have a handle on your goals before talking to anyone. No one knows your organization like you do, so getting this legwork done before hiring someone else will mean that you’re going to get more for your money in the long run.

Need Help? Contact Rootid.

Of course, if you need additional help, or have more questions. Contact us!

American Rivers protects wild rivers, restores damaged rivers, and conserves clean water for people and nature. Since 1973, American Rivers has protected and restored more than 150,000 miles of rivers through advocacy efforts, on-the-ground projects, and an annual America’s Most Endangered Rivers® campaign.

The purpose of TeenSource.org, an online resource developed by the California Family Health Council, is to improve the health and well being of young people in CA by providing non-judgmental, accurate, and reliable sexual and reproductive health information and resources.

Tips & Tricks for an Engaging Pitch

Social change isn’t easy. Your organization may have the best of intentions, but unless you can convince others to join you, you’ll never make the impact you’ve been dreaming of. You need volunteers, donors, and advocates—and the only way to get them is an engaging pitch.

So, how do you condense the complexities of your work into a concise and compelling argument? We’ll walk you through it.

Brand Matters

As we shared in "Simple Steps to Authentic Brand Strategy," branding is really just a fancy word for personality. A strong brand thinks about, interacts with, and wants to be seen by the world in a certain way. It’s critical to building operational capacity, galvanizing support, and maintaining mission focus. So, before anything else, you’ll want to:

Develop a clear value proposition and brand position to establish reputability.

Be considerate in your messaging.

Your brand needs a consistent tone. Whether it skews casual or formal is up to you, but either way, you should always be mindful of how you phrase things. You don’t want to unintentionally hurt someone. If this is a new concept, work in a group to check your language and possible biases—like we did in this example:

A few points to focus on:

“Generational health crisis” - How do you create messaging that is not inadvertently criticizing culture?

“In our community” - Are we victimizing?

“Obese” - Are we alienating individuals or treating size as a health crisis? Instead, let’s focus on health issues, i.e. the diabetes-specific statistic.

The differences are subtle but meaningful. We’ve changed the focus from shaming what children eat to leveling the playing field to create opportunity.

Like written messaging, visual language conveys a lot about the organization, but how do you develop it? Design is such a complex arena. Logos, icons, photography, fonts, and colors—it’s enough to make your head spin, but don’t worry. We’ve got you.

If you haven’t already, take a look at our “Quick and Dirty Guide to Color Theory,” and then consider the colors that best represent the feeling you want as your first impression. Need help getting creative? Mood boards are an effective way to discuss ideas, share insights, and clarify communication. They help visually explain a feeling and, in turn, develop a more authentic and successful brand.

So, now that you have the framework, how do you turn it into an engaging pitch? Start building.

Below, you’ll see a few example personas we’ve created for clients; for the purpose of this post, we’re going to focus on Darren. What would this professional giver/investor want in a pitch?

1. Your ‘Why’

In his TEDx Talk on inspiring action, Simon Sinek shared that people don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it. This is grounded in biology. Decision-making is emotional, so paint your vision in a way that helps people imagine your better world. Skeptics will still want proven results (your cynical majority), but your fellow visionaries will become your brand advocates. This ties in to the second point.

2. The Problem

Clearly articulate the problem you are trying to solve, using simple terminology (no jargon). Why does your organization exist?

Problem statements are important, because often times, they are the lead-in to your messaging and meant to capture your persona’s attention. Think of it this way: If you were stuck in an elevator with Bill Gates, how would you start your pitch for him to support your new venture? You’d probably lead with the wrong you’re trying to right in the world.

Note how the iconography used is gender-inclusive.

3. Your Unique Approach

Why is your organization best suited to tackle this problem?

4. Your Impact

What measurable difference are you making?

5. Your Expertise

Why are you qualified to drive this mission? Are you a cutting edge leader? Break it down for us, and then back it up with headlines of mass scale impacts.

6. Who You Serve

Who’s on the receiving end of this effort?

The Ask

Of course, all of this leads up to the one thing too many organizations dance around: the ask. We’ve established what WorkIt does, as well as how and why they do it. The only thing left is what kind of help they need to fuel their mission.

If they’ve correctly identified their personas and built upon each point above, chances are, the “Darrens” they’re pitching to will respond favorably. Onward and upward!

Announcing the 2019 brandUP Participants

We are excited to announce our 2019 brandUP participating organizations.

Atma Connect is an award-winning creator of software products and digital services that connect people to report problems, share solutions, and improve their communities from the ground up. Their free mobile app, AtmaGo, has reached more than 1,200,000 Indonesian users since 2015, delivering real-time, crowd-sourced content. Citizens share everything from traffic updates and job postings to breaking news during national emergencies.

City Surf Project connects underrepresented youth to the ocean—and themselves—through surfing. Their programs support those who may not otherwise have the opportunity to experience swimming lessons, ocean recreation, stewardship activities, and environmental education. They encourage healthy lifestyles and active global citizenship. (2019 Full Circle Fund Grantee)

The Environmental Volunteers organization inspires people of all ages to learn about the wonders of the natural world. They train volunteers to lead hands-on science and nature programs in schools, community organizations, and at the EcoCenter—their public nature center in the Palo Alto Baylands Nature Preserve. They also have a transportation fund to provide affordable and easy-to-schedule transportation for low-income K-12 students in the San Francisco Bay Area who would not otherwise be able to access science and environmental education field trips.

GAIA is a worldwide alliance of more than 800 grassroots groups, non-governmental organizations, and individuals in over 90 countries whose ultimate vision is a just, toxic-free world without incineration. They focus on three initiatives: promoting zero waste, reducing problematic waste streams like plastic, and putting an end to the ineffective and hazardous practice of burning waste.

LitLab creates connected and interactive early learning environments by deploying books, digital content, and blended learning solutions for under-resourced children, their caregivers, and educators. They engage parents and caregivers as a child’s first teacher, mobilize early learning advocates, empower teachers with training, and provide blended learning interventions customized through pre-survey data for each child. Through combined resources and integrated, yet customized programs, they are revolutionizing early learning.

Mobile Pathways’ team consists of immigration attorneys, technology experts, and immigrant advocates. They help undocumented and under-documented immigrants gain access to reliable legal information via mobile phone technology. A proprietary “decision tree” texts users potential paths for legal immigration status. Once they understand their options, they are given a list of qualified immigration advocates who can assist them.

MotherCoders helps women with college degrees and work experience get on a career track in tech that leverages their unique skills, experiences, and passions. Whether it’s acquiring a particular skill-set for career advancement, re-entering the workforce after a pause for motherhood, or accelerating the growth of a startup, their training program enables students to gain enough skills, knowledge, and community support to confidently take the next step (or 2 or 3) toward a career in tech.

New Left Accelerator empowers emerging, progressive organizations and leaders working to strengthen civic engagement and advance a more just and equal society. They accomplish this by running an accelerator program and serving as a resource clearinghouse for these promising, new organizations.

Partnerships for Trauma Recovery (PTR) aims to reduce the mental health gap by addressing the psychosocial impacts of trauma caused by war, torture, forced displacement, human trafficking, and persecution due to identity and beliefs. Their model is built on three complementary components: mental health care for international survivors of human rights abuses, clinical training for globally-minded clinicians, and policy advocacy for efforts aimed at reducing trauma.(2019 Full Circle Fund Grantee)

Renaissance Entrepreneurship Center empowers and increases the entrepreneurial capacities of socially and economically diverse women and men, thereby strengthening communities through the creation of sustainable new businesses, new jobs, and the promotion of financial self-sufficiency. They offer low-cost office space and ongoing business support to emerging and established small businesses at several locations. They also offer free one-on-one financial consultation. (2019 Full Circle Fund Grantee)

Richmond Promise is a community-wide college success initiative to build a college graduating culture in Richmond, CA. Through a college scholarship, collaborative cross-sector partnerships, and supportive programming, they aim to ensure all students in Richmond excel to and through higher education, reach their career goals, and become change-making leaders in the community.

RYSE creates safe spaces grounded in social justice for young people to love, learn, educate, heal, and transform lives and communities. Their youth center has free programs in education and justice; community health; media, arts, and culture; and youth organizing. Programming at RYSE is anchored in the belief that young people have the lived knowledge and expertise to identify, prioritize, and direct the activities and services necessary to thrive.

Shawl-Anderson Dance Center provides Bay Area dance students of all ages and levels with high caliber training in both contemporary and traditional movement forms in a welcoming, non-competitive environment. The Center is a non-profit organization, committed to nurturing and mentoring the growth of dancers and choreographers; cultivating a healthy and supportive atmosphere for creative expression; sustaining traditions essential to excellence in the field; and fostering the evolution of the art of dance.

Sirum saves lives by connecting organizations with surplus medications to patients in need. in the U.S. there is often a large supply of unexpired drugs that are collected from manufacturers, wholesalers, pharmacies and health facilities. Sirum helps connect that surplus supply with clinics and pharmacies that serve low-income families. (2019 Full Circle Fund Grantee)

The Social Justice Sewing Academy (SJSA) is an art program that bridges artistic expression with activism and empowers youth to amplify their voice through art that advocates for social justice. By using textile art as a vehicle for personal transformation and community cohesion, SJSA empowers youth to become agents of social change. A unique part of their program intentionally bridges generational, racial, and socioeconomic divides by sending youth art blocks to embroiderers all over the world.

The Spanish Speaking Citizens’ Foundation empowers East Bay families to improve their lives, embrace their heritage, and develop as civic leaders. They provide educational and workforce development services, as well as help navigating immigration and citizenship. They also partner with government and community organizations to assist families and youth in securing programs, services, and resources to enrich their lives.

TalkingPoints drives student success in low-income, diverse areas through building strong partnerships across parents, schools, and communities. Their goal is to impact 3 million students and their parents by 2020. (2019 Full Circle Fund Grantee)

Tandem® engages the community to ensure all families have the resources, skills, and confidence they need to support their children’s kindergarten readiness. StoryCycles®, their school-to-home book-sharing program, provides families with access to high-quality children’s books and support materials. They also offer free, community-based workshops for families, caregivers, and educators to deepen their knowledge of early childhood brain development and share simple, effective strategies for building language and literacy through everyday activities. (2019 Full Circle Fund Grantee)

Tarjimly means “translate for me” and was founded in 2017 in response to the Syrian refugee crisis and the US Refugee & Travel Ban. Their mission is to improve the lives of refugees and the efficiency of humanitarian services by eliminating language barriers. The Tarjimly mobile app allows the world’s 3 billion multilingual speakers to remotely volunteer their language skills as translators and interpreters for the 65 million displaced people.(2019 Full Circle Fund Grantee)

Turn Out maximizes the impact of volunteerism to strengthen LGBTQ+ communities. They accomplish this via three main programs: recruitment, matching, and events. Through their biweekly newsletter, which highlights new opportunities, and their online platform, volunteers can join the projects that are right for them.

Urban Ed Academy leverages community partnerships in education to drive culturally reflective experiences for students of color in schools as a means of closing the opportunity gap. They use hands-on, interactive, and culturally relevant approaches to ensure students gain an understanding of themselves, the world around them, and how it applies to various academic and social settings.

Urban Strategies Council is a regional research and advocacy organization, dedicated to social, economic, and racial equity. Their mission is to eliminate persistent poverty in the Bay Area by working with partners to transform low-income neighborhoods into vibrant, healthy communities. Issue areas include: criminal justice reform, boys and men of color, economic opportunity, pathways to career and college, and violence prevention.

A Guide to Creating a Nonprofit Measurement Plan

Few great things in the world were created without first planning, then measuring. So, why is your nonprofit any different?

All too often, it's hard to know what should be measured and what should not be. What is really important for your nonprofit to measure?

Tools like Google Analytics and other data sources have so many reports and data fields. How do we know what's meaningful?

The good news is that if you are reading this article, you’re headed in the right direction - you see measurement and data as a valuable tool to make informed decisions and tell your impact story.

This post will walk you through the process of building a measurement plan that’s specific to your nonprofit. It will help you choose the data and reporting that’s important to monitor so you can become a more data-driven nonprofit.

Ignore the Headlines - Kind Of

Many nonprofits get caught up in metrics that aren’t as important as they think. Especially when it comes to their website.

Too often we’ve had clients only monitor the number of page visits and bounce rate of their site to measure success.

These metrics can be important, but only in context of your broader goals.

If you goal is to raise $100,000 through your website, wouldn’t you want to track the money coming in instead of the page visits?

Of course you would!

The same is true if your nonprofit goal is to recruit more volunteers, members or acquire more donors.

I often think that organizations fall in love with these headline metrics because they’re not sure what else to measure. And, they like the big numbers!

Luckily, we’re here to help your team get out of that habit.

Establish Your Nonprofit Outcomes and Work Backwards

The best way to establish a good measurement plan is to start at the end result and work backwards.

Using a nonprofit logic model can be a powerful tool to provide structure to your business goals and define your measurement needs.

To summarize how this works, let’s look at an example from the logic model post that we linked to above.

EXAMPLE ORGANIZATION (We made this up): Clean-up And Restoration Team (CART) is a volunteer-driven environmental clean-up and restoration organization that uses volunteer labor to clean-up locations that have been left polluted by industrial companies. With volunteer crews they clean-up these locations and restore them using native species of plants.

Outputs are what we want to measure. Outputs represent the things that your business needs to generate on your website and other marketing channels to generate the outcomes you want to create.

Write down the outputs you need. These are going to be one set of KPI’s that we want to record.

But, wait!

Don't forget that outcomes should be measured as well. These often tell the best story.

For CART, they could measure the number of acres of restored Habitat. They could also measure the the miles of streams that have been affected by the land clean-up. Sometimes these larger numbers can be more difficult to come by, so make sure that you're recording these project successes somewhere. They tell a great story!

The measurement doesn't stop here though....

Define & Measure Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s)

With any business goal, there will be actions that individuals take that relate to your activities and key outputs, and there will be actions that people take that represent a step towards that ultimate outcome.

For instance, with CART one of their key activities is recruiting volunteers.

However, they also know from analyzing their data, that one out of five individuals that signs-up for their enewsletter on their website will eventually become a volunteer.

So, you could see why they want to measure both, right?

These are referred to macro-conversions and micro-conversions.

Macro-conversions have direct impact on your business goals. Micro-conversions may lead to an eventual macro-conversion.

To follow along with our example, CART has 3 macro conversions:

Volunteer Sign-ups

Clean-up sites Available

Active Volunteer Leaders

Here are some potential micro-conversions:

Volunteer Orientation Attendees

Newsletter Sign-ups

Volunteer Leader Application Submissions

Interested Clean-up Location Form Submissions

You can see how these micro-conversions are indicators of opportunities that could turn into macro-conversions. But, these two are necessarily not directly related.

Tips to Measure More Effectively in Google Analytics

Once you have established your micro- and macro-conversions, it’s time to create the conversion goals in Google Analytics.

If you haven’t already, setting up Google Analytics goals in your account is a must. Remember at the beginning when we said that we should ignore the headline metrics? That’s because goals are the bread and butter of your organization’s success. So, we need to set them up.

Here are a few tips for better measurement:

1. Assign a Value to Macro-Conversions: Even if you don’t think your conversion has an explicit dollar value, it’s important to think hard about this.

In the case of CART, you may assume that volunteers have no value. They do!

How many hours is a volunteer shift? Multiply that by the amount you might pay a laborer to do that work. That’s the value of a volunteer sign-up.

Value of Volunteer = Length of Shift x Assumed Wage

Once you start to see this value, you will start to understand that your marketing efforts are generating value for the company.

And, if you are advertising, you’ll be able to establish return on investment (ROI) on your ad spend.

2. Use Campaign Tracking in Your External Marketing Channels: Google has a nifty feature called campaign tracking, or UTM tags. This allows you to add pieces of data into links that you use in social media, emails, or anywhere that give rich insight into where your conversions are coming from.

Why does this matter?

By parsing out your marketing efforts, you will have real visibility into which marketing channel and effort is helping you generate the outputs your company needs.

Why is Data Important for Marketing and Communications?

Too often we think of data as being internal facing. It helps us make decisions about the effectiveness of our programs. It influences budgeting and business decisions.

The truth is that data is also critical to your outward facing communications, and telling your impact story.

All nonprofits have a vision for how they will affect the world. That vision is what will initially attract your supporters - it's the "why" that gets them hooked on your mission. But, showing impact is what will keep funders and supporters coming back time after time.

It's great to have an inspirational story, but if you want to scale your impact, you need to show funders and supporters that you're work is making a difference at a larger level. Data tells that story.

This is fine, but relies on the anecdotal. Were there just 10 volunteers? Did they only do one project? If so, that's not really that impressive. There's no expression of real impact here.

Compare that to:

In 2018, CART empowered 20,000 community volunteers to restore more than 1,200 square miles of abandoned industrial waste sites (that’s the size of Rhode Island!) and helped restore the quality of our drinking water to over a million people!

Wow! Now that's scale....

Not only does measurement tell the impact story better, it also shows funders and supporters that your organization is sophisticated enough to be able to measure. It shows them that you're taking a methodical and calculated approach to your mission.

If you can then back-up this measurement with a great story, then you have a winning communications formula.

Develop a Nonprofit Culture of Data

Now that you understand the process of turning business goals into measurable outputs. How do we make this matter on a day-to-day basis?

This is a tough question. Establishing a culture of data is not something that happens overnight. There are key elements to help your organization make this transition.

Everyone Onboard

The role of data should be recognized at every level of your organization. And, the access to data needs to be democratized.

If you have a data analyst at your organization, then you can’t expect them to be the gatekeeper to all data.

Leaders, directors, managers and interns all need to be able to make decisions around data.

Once everyone is onboard, carve out time at your department and staff meetings to talk about what you’re seeing in your data.

Decision Making Process

When everyone has access to the data, decision making processes should follow similar models to what we’ve talked about above.

What are the outcomes we want? What are the outputs needed for that? What are the inputs needed to get there? How do we expect that to show in the data we currently have?

By starting with an outcome and then building a strategy, you can track your efforts more closely.

Don’t be afraid to fail! Rather than putting your head in the sand if the data shows that your efforts didn’t pan out, use the data to figure out why it didn’t turn out.

Refine your approach and try again.

Madness is doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result. Data helps us do things differently.

Build Tools That Provide Access to Data

In order to put the power of data in everyone’s hands, it’s important to build tools that they can use on their own.

Luckily, Google Analytics allows you to build dashboards that anyone on your team can access. It also allows you to automatically email these on a regular basis to the whole team. This gives everyone direct access to the latest information.

The second option is using Google Data Studio.

In addition to pulling in GA data, Google Data Studio will allow you to pull in data from a number of different services like email services providers and social media platforms. It can serve as your central data dashboard.

Wrapping up

I get it. There are million things going on at your organization, and this may not be top of your list.

However, it’s important to take the first step in this process. Bring it up at your next meeting, or frame your next conversation with your team based on data that you see taking place on the website.

Framing your conversation in this way may spark a larger conversation around our biases to make decisions based on gut and not proof. That can be a powerful place to start.

How to Increase Donor Retention with Automated Welcome Series

The need to boost donor retention is necessary to keep your nonprofit organization up and running. This is one fact we can’t ignore.

Cultivating a strong and lasting relationship with donors proves valuable for nonprofit organizations in acquiring funds and creating a community of supporters.

There are several ways nonprofits can increase donor retention and one of those is by optimizing the power of email marketing automation. But before we delve deeper into how you can implement automated welcome emails, let’s first run through on the foundational pieces.

Email marketing is critical to the success of nonprofit fundraising.

Given its effectiveness in generating ROI, email marketing is an important channel of communication for nonprofits to connect and engage with donors and supporters. In contrast to other channels, email marketing is inexpensive, and more and more donors are growing comfortable with completing donations online.

Communication is of high importance for nonprofits. Email marketing lets your organization thank donors, entice more volunteers to join, and spread your mission to a wider audience with ease through tailored, auto-generated emails. This way, you can focus more on your goals and less on online engagement.

Another thing to highlight is…

The importance of increasing donor retention in your organization.

Acquiring first-time donors is both time-consuming and expensive. Therefore, cultivating relationships with existing donors is essential in keeping them more involved with and connected to your mission.

A recent study showed that only 46% of donors have given to the same organization two years in a row - a figure that signifies there’s more room to level up your donor retention strategy and bring in more funds down the line.

If you focus more of your efforts on a strong retention program, you spend fewer resources, gain more sustainable funding, and can increase your organizational productivity.

Boost your donor retention with email marketing automation.

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: email marketing is one of the most effective methods in generating ROI, as well as connecting and engaging your organization with the right audience.

Optimizing email marketing by using automated email series as part of your donor retention strategy holds the key to increasing the number on your donor’s list.

Automated email series can help increase your donor retention.

Suppose you have new supporters who just donated. The first thing you would want to do is to make them feel welcome right away. How do you do this? By sending a series of automated welcome emails.

The first few messages you send to your new contacts are crucial because one, it sets expectations about your organization and two, it paves the way in keeping your donors committed to the cause.

The beauty of automated emails is that you don’t have to do it manually, thus saving precious staff bandwidth. You only have to set the stage once, key in certain user actions (or triggers), and the relevant email will automatically send once a contact has taken action.

Think of it like having a direct dialogue with both your current and prospective donors at the right moments.

By now you might want to start rolling out your automated welcome email series. But first, you should know what to send.

You can start your automated welcome series with…

A welcome and thank you message

You should send the first email immediately - after they sign up or donate - or within 48 hours the latest. It’s clear what this email should be about, which is to welcome and thank the donor for their gift.

This email is also a good way to reinforce the fact that their donation is helping your nonprofit make an impact.

A follow-up email that informs and engages

Give your donors the opportunity to get to know more about your organization, its mission, and current and planned activities. Showcase the impact of their donation on your efforts through interesting information about your work.

It’s important to let your donors know what their gift is making possible. It opens an opportunity to further inform your donors of the kind of work you’re doing and how their donation helps. You can also ask your donors a question or invite them to follow you on social media.

Sending follow up emails can go a long way in establishing loyalty and support for your organization.

This email by charity:water is a perfect example of an email that informs and engages with the recipient.

A story with impact

Nothing gets someone’s attention or interest better than a good story. Share compelling stories you’ve encountered along the way, stories of people whose lives were changed, stories of how your team works to achieve your organization’s goal.

Show your supporters your progress and accomplishments made possible with their help. Share your success with them.

An invitation to stay involved

After some weeks of connecting and engaging with your donors, it’s time to present them with other opportunities to engage. You can invite them to your events, inform them of different volunteer work, or open the opportunity to donate again.

Invite them to be more involved and engaged. Doing so makes them feel that they’re part of your mission and your work.

Just don’t spam them with donation appeals. You wouldn’t want to give them the impression that it’s all about getting a donation.

The one thing to keep in mind when doing your automated welcome series is to make it personal. Your welcome emails should be short, sweet and interesting to keep your donors engaged.

Before you start planning your welcome email series, come up with a checklist of the important things to do and consider first.

1. Segment your audience.

Not everyone in your list has the same motive when they give. Their first moment of contact with your organization, as well as their interests and attributes, vary. Use segmentation to send the right email to the right person at the right time. If you segment your nonprofit’s list, you get to deliver relevant content and reach more donors effectively.

2. Understand donor’s motivations.

Aside from using segmentation and creating a compelling subject line to grab your donor’s interest, you can go deeper by understanding their motivations and priorities in joining your cause. This study will help you identify five main reasons people give - also known by the acronym T.A.S.T.E.

Trust. Emphasize the idea among your donors that your nonprofit will make the best use of the resources they gave. You can reinforce this in your subject line emails to start with.

Altruism.An altruistic concern for the wellbeing of others may be the most powerful reason that compels people to donate or volunteer. You can include photos of your nonprofit’s actual work in your welcome email series.

Social. One of the motivating factors for donors to give is when a loved one cares about or is involved in the cause. Use testimonials or stories from your staff, volunteers, or people you’ve helped to emphasize the impact of their donation.

Taxes. Charitable gifts often qualify for tax deductions so consider stressing this point as you approach the end of the year. Create targeted campaigns around the holiday season to generate awareness and drive donations.

Egoism. This refers to the positive feelings that linger on people when they display charitable behavior. Make your donors feel like they’ve done a good deed in your welcome email series.

3. Optimize your welcome email campaigns.

Test and review what works for your emails and then use the results to improve your fundraising campaigns. It’s important to personalize your nonprofit’s message and segment your audiences.

4. Send different types of content.

Don’t just ask for donations. Raising funds might be the biggest challenge most charities face, but it’s not ideal when people associate your emails with an ask. You can create and send different types of content that cover a variety of topics - expressing gratitude to donors, telling specific stories with emotions, showing the effects of their donation, inviting them to be involved, and so on.

The Canadian Red Cross informs their audience about the many ways data and tech can make it easier to help those in need. At the same time it also encourages their audience to like, follow and engage with their social channels.

Understanding the value of donor retention and how email marketing can boost it helps you come up with a strong retention strategy that will grow and maintain your list of supporters. Setting up and sending automated welcome emails lets you cultivate and nurture the early stages of your relationship with donors, which will then lead to a strong belief and loyalty in your organization.

Author Bio

Jericho Gonzales is a Content Marketing Specialist at Campaign Monitor. After seven years of being unhappy with his career in the financial industry, he decided to follow his dreams and become a writer. Besides writing, he is also passionate about all kinds of martial arts and practices whenever he can.

At the same time, our supporters are more bombarded with email than ever before.

As a result email open rates and click through rates (CTR), have dropped dramatically over the last 5 years. According to the MailChimp benchmark report, the average email open rate for nonprofit is only 24.11%.

The same report shows that the average email click through rate is just 2.57%.

This blows my mind!

To put it another way, 97.43% of people on your list will not take action when you send them an email. Ouch!

The good news is there are specific strategies to overcome these problems.

What is a Click Through Rate (CTR)?

Measuring your marketing efforts is the most important thing you can do in order to get better and more efficient.

Click through rate, is one of the most important things to be measuring.

Put simply, if you send an email to 100 people, and 10 people click on a link in that email, you will have a Click Through Rate, or CTR, of 10%.

Why is Click Through Rate so important?

To understand the importance of CTR, let’s look a fictious example.

Let’s say our nonprofit is looking to raise a $10,000 online.

If you send an email to 2,000 supporters and you get a CTR of 5%, 100 people will donate as a result of that email. Let’s assume that everyone that clicks also donates (this is not usually the case and an effective donation page has a huge influence on this, but for the sake of example, we’ll keep it simple...).

For this example, each user donates $50.

This campaign would gross $5,000.

Not bad!

Now, let’s say that same email campaign, was able to achieve a CTR of 10% instead of 5%. This time 200 people donate. Again, or average donation is $50.

This time we met our goals of $10,000.

We doubled our revenue by simply increasing our CTR.

So, you can now see why as marketers and fundraisers we should be so focused on our CTR.

Use Email List Segmentation to Increase CTR

The most powerful lever that you have as a marketer to drive action is your understanding of your audience.

Most nonprofits have several distinct personas that they are speaking to. Each persona, or audience has a motivation, or topic of interest that originally brought them to your organization.

You need to know what that motivation is, and leverage it in your email marketing.

How do you do this?

There are several ways.

First, it’s important to capture their motivation when they initially sign-up for your email list. You can use email marketing automation to capture this information, or use checkboxes on your sign-up form to capture this.

Once you capture this information, use it to segment your email lists based on those motivations or interests.

Most Email Service Providers (ESP's) or CRM’s will allow you to tag your constituents with this information.

Once segmented, use this knowledge to your advantage.

If you know a donor is motivated by your work saving the polar bears, frame your email to them using that motivation.

If you can identify several different areas to segment your donors, then use those segments to develop your email campaigns, your CTR will increase dramatically.

The Secret Sauce to Crafting Better Email Subject Lines

Your first battle in email marketing is to get the user to open the email. If they open your email, then they're one step closer to clicking on your email content.

It sounds simple, but it’s not as simple as you think.

As we said at the beginning, nonprofit industry average for email open rates is just 24.11%.

Here are a few tips to constructing a better subject line to beat that average.

Mystery – Don’t give it all away up front. Leave the user wanting to know more. For example:

“A Special Offer Awaits You!”

“Your Next Opportunity is Here!”

Utility – Email can be an escape or quick win for people as much as it is a necessity. Make the email something that can help the user with their day. For example:

“A Quick Win for You Today!”

“We Can Help You Do More”

Use “You” – Make it personal. Especially in today’s world, making your message personal gets a much better response. As often as possible use “You” in the subject line. For example:

“An Idea for You”

“A Gift For You”

Time – Research has shown that anything that uses time reference is going to inherently increase open rates. It doesn’t necessarily have to be “today” or “tomorrow.” You can also use days of the week. For example:

“This Sunday Things Will Change for You”

“What’s Special About Today?”

Avoid Opportunistic Tone – People don’t like to feel hustled. You may need to test the boundaries on this as it is a fine line, but you want to sound authentic and natural. So, for instance:

“Time is Running Out” (NO)

“It’s Important That We Remember…” (YES!)

There is a fine line here, but it’s important to get this right. You can put supporters off quickly if you sound pushy or like we’re hustling them.

Tips to Write Compelling Email Content to Improve CTR

Once you've got your audience to open the email, how do we improve the clicks? Here are a few tactics.

Leave a Little Mystery - Don't tell the user the entire story. Leave something that they need to click through to find out more.

If you're showcasing how one of your programs changed a client's life, setup the problem they face, but don't reveal the struggle to victory. Use the copy, or better yet video, on your website to tell the rest of the story.

Users are more likely to click through if they don't have all of the information yet. Make them want to click through!

Keep Your Copy Focused - Don't write a novel. People today are distracted (squirrel!), and they don't have a lot of time. Keep the email copy to no more than 3 paragraphs. And, a paragraph should be 2-3 short sentences max.

Focus on Audience Motivations - We mentioned that segmentation is a powerful tool. Make sure you're using your understanding of users to craft copy that specific to them. Don't send the same email to your entire list. Segment your list by motivation, and craft your copy based around this.

For instance, if you have a program that saves the polar bears, and you have a donor segment that love polar bears, send them an email with copy specific to your polar bear program, not your marsh restoration program.

Makes sense, right?

Use Buttons for Call To Actions - Most ESP's provide an option in their editing interface to add call to action buttons in your copy. There's a reason for this. They're WAY more effective in driving action.